Chapter 21

THE HARVEST

ROWS OF WALNUT TREES line the road to Tulare, California, casting jagged shadows in the morning light. Many have already been harvested, electric shakers tethered to the tree trunks shocking the green nuts from their branches. The weather is still warm in the valley during the day, but within a month the skies will turn gray and the snow will start to fall in the Sierra Nevada.

It’s election time, and Nunes is driving through his home district, California’s Twenty-second. His daughters Julia and Margaret are in the back seat chatting quietly, accustomed to making the Saturday-morning rounds with their father. Their route encompasses the entire district, Tulare and most of eastern Fresno, as well as Visalia and Clovis.

On the highway into Visalia, it’s plain that Russiagate madness has migrated like pollution from Washington, DC, fouling the warm Central Valley air. Billboards in Russian with Nunes’s picture portray him as a Putin stooge.

This is the new local landscape that the national media has shaped. Days before the Nunes Memo was released, MSNBC analyst John Heilemann asked Connecticut senator Chris Murphy if “we actually have a Russian agent running the House Intel Committee on the Republican side?”

Many of Nunes’s constituents have been poisoned by the propaganda campaign aimed at him. Outside activists have flooded the district, calling the congressman a traitor.

At a Starbucks in Visalia, a middle-aged woman in dark glasses corners Nunes and his two girls. “This is not why we sent you to Washington,” she says. “Not to support Trump. We’re very disappointed in you. We need to have a town hall for you to answer questions.”

“I’m here for you right now,” says Nunes, putting himself between the woman and his daughters. “What did you want to talk about? Have you contacted my office to set up a meeting?”

“Actually,” she admits, “I’m not in your district.”

The self-styled anti-Trump “resistance” that has zeroed in on Nunes is anything but a progressive grass-roots movement. Rather, it’s a function of Democratic Party donors underwriting tactics designed to protect the privileges and prerogatives of the coastal elite, from the Beltway to Hollywood. The “resistance” is how college-educated leftist masses have been mobilized to march on behalf of political corruption.

“They’re trying to teach me a lesson,” says Nunes during the drive. “‘If you go after the bad things we do in Washington, we’ll come after you at home.’”

Home is partly the sequence of routines determined by the people who inhabit a place. “I’ve had the same friends, known all the same people, since I was a kid,” says Nunes.

For him, Saturdays typically begin with coffee brewed by Basil Perch, the seventy-seven-year-old former mayor of Visalia. Perch holds court every Saturday morning in the offices of his construction firm housed in a local industrial park.

Posters of Perch’s granddaughter’s high school soccer team and photographs of his grandfather as a young man just escaped from the Armenian genocide fill the walls.

Perch sits at the head of a large table surrounded by other local businessmen—such as Mike Fistolera, another builder—who like talking about politics, national and local. “I have people on the inside who talk to me,” he says with a smile. He’s chewing on an unlit cigar and asks Nunes about Washington. Perch likes Trump. “He knows what real leadership is all about,” says Perch. “So does he,” he continues, pointing his cigar at the congressman.

Nunes mostly listens. With Perch and the others, the GOP maverick who’s energized half the nation by taking on virtually every authority and entrenched institution in the national capital is a younger man among the elders, men of his father’s generation.

Nunes’s circle is bound by old-world values drawn from the various immigrant blocs that make up his constituency—among others, Portuguese, like his family, Armenians like Perch’s, and Mexicans, the latest arrivals.

Later we head to a parade ground to watch Nunes’s eldest daughter, Evelyn, drill for her middle school marching band, and it appears at least half of the kids from the dozen or so bands are from Latino families. English is their first language. They don’t speak Spanish because their parents want them to grow up as Americans.

Nunes says he doesn’t have much trouble identifying his supporters from a distance. “Boots, jeans, pocket T-shirts, it doesn’t matter if it’s a white guy or a Mexican guy,” he says. “They’re dressed like normal Valley people, own trucks and the like. When you see older retired white bureaucrats or professors in expensive hybrid cars, chances are good they’re not my supporters.”

Before the Russia investigations, Nunes had enjoyed the support of independents and moderate Democrats. He was first elected in 2002 when he promised to take on environmentalists who wanted to divert water into the ocean and choke the land.

“Devin was originally elected because he promised to fight the water wars,” says Ray Appleton, central California’s top-rated radio talk show host.

Appleton started in radio nearly fifty years ago on the music side. The long-haired, gray-bearded, thick-chested sixty-six-year-old in a leather jacket looks less like a conservative pundit than a rocker who is surprised by nothing that humans do. He first met Nunes during his initial congressional race. “Oddly, I supported the other guy,” Appleton tells me. “But Devin was the best man for the job. Even his opponent said so. Now we’re all close friends.”

The 2018 race was hardly as cordial. The Democrats spent more than $9 million on his opponent’s race. Local political analysts estimate that they spent another $2 million in dark money. That made his opponent, who had no prior political experience, one of the biggest fund-raisers in the entire congressional election cycle. Money on that scale buys a lot of mail pieces and TV ads in a small media market like the Central Valley. Nunes’s opponents inundated the safely Republican district with attack ads. They weren’t trying to unseat Nunes but to punish him—and his family.

After the attacks on his family and the death threats in the run-up to the release of the memo, the anti-Nunes operation gathered steam, with operatives and the press looking for any dirt with which to smear him.

Esquire magazine sent reporter Ryan Lizza to Iowa for a story purporting to blow the lid off a “secret” farm owned by Nunes’s father. It was hardly any secret; Nunes senior had moved to Iowa more than a dozen years before to help his younger son. Lizza tracked Nunes family members who had become concerned after they’d discovered the reporter had been fired from a job for sexual misconduct.

They went after Nunes’s family in California, too. In September, a film crew trespassed on Tulare land farmed by his Uncle Gerald to generate a story out of his outrage and put it on film.

“The point was to use me as another thing to go after Devin,” says Gerald, a broad-chested man with the forearms and permanent tan of a professional baseball coach. He drives me on a tour of the dairy farm, first bought by his grandparents. He points to the wooden house where he grew up, a little more than a decade before his nephew was born. Hundreds of light brown cows are grazing in the afternoon sun.

“Cows are great animals,” says Devin Nunes. “But it was always my goal to be in the wine business. My mother’s father owned a vineyard and grew grapes.”

Nunes’s agricultural background is a frequent point of attack for his Deep State adversaries and the press. “When I’m home in California, I do a lot of interviews from the World Ag Expo in Tulare because it’s closer to my home than the TV studios. An extra benefit is that the tractors in the background drive the Left crazy. One thing I’ve learned is that it’s really easy to troll these people.”

Clovis is a small, bright California town that looks like a set out of a western produced by conservatives: clean, polite, and devout.

Nunes steps into a coffee shop owned by a former NFL linebacker, Zack Follett, an evangelical Christian who starred at Clovis High School before going on to the University of California at Berkeley. After a neck injury brought his career to an end, he opened a chain of Christian coffee shops. A few college students are scattered around the shop, sipping caffelattes with their laptops open, writing term papers on the Bible.

Nunes waits in line for coffee, shaking hands with supporters and deflecting praise with a short laugh. A man in operating room scrubs wants to speak with him about the investigations.

Josh LeRoy, a thirty-seven-year-old medical device salesman, tells Nunes that many of his friends and family follow his efforts to hold the conspirators accountable.

“I’m not starstruck or anything,” LeRoy tells me later. “If it was Michael Jordan, I wouldn’t care. But I felt I needed to thank Devin for what he is doing for our country because I truly feel he is risking his life fighting for us.”

LeRoy didn’t know about the death threats against Nunes. “It takes real courage,” he says. He notes one of the most interesting aspects of the Nunes phenomenon: “The only guy to take a stand is from California,” says LeRoy, “the most liberal state of the union.”

It’s not easy to become a national figure from a state dominated by left-wing politics. Nunes became a national figure not by adjusting his message to gain admirers around the country but by projecting the values of the local community that raised him.

LeRoy asks when the documents the HPSCI chair asked for will be declassified.

It’s a year and a half into the investigation, and Nunes is still surprised that so many people who come up to him know all the details of the plot against Trump, the figures involved—Comey, Brennan, Steele, Simpson, McCabe, Strzok and Page, the Ohrs—and the status of HPSCI’s investigation. The first rallying cry was to release the memo. Now it’s to declassify the documents.

After the Objective Medusa team had pushed out the memo, Patel argued that the best thing would be if Americans could see for themselves what the Crossfire Hurricane team had done. “We assembled a number of buckets of information provided to us by the FBI and DOJ that would best tell the story without jeopardizing national security interests,” he says.

During the summer, Nunes had asked the White House to declassify the information. “It was pages ten to twelve and seventeen to thirty-four of the third and final FISA renewal,” says Patel. “There was also the twelve Bruce Ohr 302s—which is just a loose description because they’re not just about Bruce Ohr. And finally exculpatory information that was withheld from the FISA court.”

Patel says that he considers the last item the most significant. “For me as a prosecutor,” says the former DOJ lawyer, “the biggest thing in the world is Brady.”

The “Brady rule,” established by the Supreme Court in Brady v. Maryland (1963), requires the prosecution to turn over exculpatory evidence.

“It is the duty and the ethical responsibility of the DOJ to provide that to the court,” says Patel. “It would be one thing if DOJ went in there and said, ‘We didn’t have this in our system. There was no way for us to know this.’ And sometimes that happens. But in this instance we found the documents that showed they knew the exculpatory evidence existed. They created it, they could have presented it and chose not to. They withheld it from the court.”

On September 17, Trump had ordered the material to be declassified. A few days later, Andrew McCabe had appeared to send a warning to the DOJ official who could convince Trump not to declassify.

A New York Times story by Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt sourced in part to McCabe’s memos reported how in May 2017, Rod Rosenstein had talked about recording the president and invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove him from office.

Rosenstein denied it in a comment to the Times. In a Washington Post article intended to douse the fire the Times piece had started, an unnamed Rosenstein ally claimed that the DOJ official had been joking. The comment had been meant sarcastically, “along the lines of: ‘What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?’”

The light McCabe had shone on Rosenstein’s zeal to topple the president just a year before might have helped remind the deputy attorney general that there were plenty of documents memorializing the misdeeds of many, including Rosenstein. In any event, Rosenstein dissuaded Trump from declassifying documents that would have spelled trouble for the Crossfire Hurricane team. On September 21, the president tweeted:

I met with the DOJ concerning the declassification of various UNREDACTED documents. They agreed to release them but stated that so doing may have a perceived negative impact on the Russia probe. Also, key Allies called to ask not to release.

Therefore, the Inspector General has been asked to review these documents on an expedited basis. I believe he will move quickly on this (and hopefully other things which he is looking at). In the end I can always declassify if it proves necessary. Speed is very important to me—and everyone!

Nunes and his team recognized Rosenstein’s hand immediately. Using the “allies” as an excuse, says Patel, was the same thing DOJ had done when it had resisted providing the information HPSCI had requested for the memo.

“I imagine something like: Rosenstein called his counterparts in the UK to say, ‘Hey, this is a really sensitive investigation. I’d appreciate if you agreed with me that the disclosure of any information would jeopardize our relationship.’ And the guy over there says, ‘Yeah, that sounds good. Tell the president we agree with you.’ So Rosenstein goes to Trump and says, ‘I talked to England. They said they don’t want to jeopardize our relationship.’”

Patel says he can’t help but be impressed by Rosenstein’s ability to maneuver in tight places. “He’s a very good bureaucrat. That’s how they operate. I’ve been in those meetings. It’s very easy for them to gloss over embarrassing details and use the institution as a shield.”

Rumors circulated that the Australians and British were worried about having their role in Crossfire Hurricane exposed. Nunes and Patel discount the likelihood that foreign governments had participated in the operation.

Australia wasn’t involved, says Nunes. “It was not official Five Eyes intelligence that opened the investigation.” It was a rumor that Downer had passed to the State Department, which had relayed it to the FBI.

Patel speculates on what the UK intelligence services might or might not have known about the operation. “My hunch is that England doesn’t know the depth of what the FBI did over there and how they did it,” he says.

He explains the steps the FBI must take to investigate crimes on foreign soil: “The FBI cannot just go and run an investigation in a foreign country.” They must be invited by that country. That is a mandatory requirement. So they contact our embassy there and say we need help. And sometimes there’s an FBI representative in the embassy, the legal attaché. We get the invitation, tell them who will come, and what we intend to do. You can’t just unilaterally go in, especially in a place like England. No way.”

Patel thinks the DOJ and FBI were not forthright with London. “I suspect Rosenstein was worried about that coming out,” he says. “That’s one reason why he scared off the president on declassification. That’s why he fought us on the FISA and the memo, on declass, and why he fought us on these documents every step of the way.”

Objective Medusa didn’t get the documents declassified in September. But there was an upside. “I always said that when DOJ and the FBI started shooting at each other like McCabe and Rosenstein did, it means we won,” says Patel.

Conservatives argued that declassification would have helped at the polls. Making public more details of the coup might have turned voters against a Democratic Party that had paid a foreign spy to undermine a US presidential campaign.

Nunes isn’t sure. “If those same voters weren’t already moved to anger by what we’d shown in the memo, they were never going to wake up. But of course, had the same thing been done to Hillary, they’d have been burning tires in the streets.”

Nothing will happen, says Nunes, until there’s a new attorney general. “Trump couldn’t fire Sessions before the elections, or that would definitely hurt at the polls,” he says. “But no matter what happens on Tuesday, Sessions is gone after the election.”

It’s election day 2018. Nunes is far up in the polls but isn’t optimistic about the Republicans’ chances in the House. And he’s distracted. HPSCI staff director Damon Nelson has been diagnosed with a serious illness that struck suddenly. He’s dying. Nelson kept the committee, the congressman, and the staff focused, sharp, and optimistic during their hardest days of the last eighteen months.

“All of my friends and family know Damon, too,” Nunes says of his old high school friend.

Robert Quinn is another old friend, Nunes’s roommate at Cal Poly and a pistachio farmer. Quinn’s father, Ron, pulls me outside for a smoke. He’s a Marine Corps veteran who fought in Vietnam and went back to the farm when he returned. “I learned the most important thing in my life in the Marines: don’t quit, don’t surrender,” says the elder Quinn. “I like to think Devin got some of that from me. I’m really proud of him. I’ve known him since he and Robert were kids. When he first got into politics, I encouraged him to do it and told him he’d win.”

Most of Nunes’s circle are at the election-night gathering in a large Portuguese American meeting hall in a rural area outside Tulare: Nunes’s wife and children, his Uncle Gerald, and Basil Perch.

Supporters, some of them in Team Nunes baseball caps, fleeces, and T-shirts, wait in line for tacos and beer. The mood is festive, and with Nunes up by thirteen points, most are watching the national results. Weeks after the election, Nunes’s winning margin will close to six points. Part of that is because of ballot harvesting.

“The Democrats are out registering everyone,” the congressman explains. “Then they go pick up the ballots from people’s houses.”

With the Democrats’ victory in the House, Nunes lost the gavel and Adam Schiff took control of HPSCI. The Objective Medusa team had always known they were running against the clock. But they finished their work on time.

They showed that law enforcement had used a politically funded document to spy on a presidential campaign. They showed that after the election, the sting operation had turned into a coup. They showed that the press had partnered with dirty cops and political operatives to topple Trump and undo the laws, principles, and institutions that sustain the country. Nunes and his team uncovered the biggest political scandal in US history: a governmentwide plot targeting not only the commander in chief but also the American public as a whole.

In retrospect, it’s not surprising that in this instance, the defense of the United States started in the Central Valley. Nunes’s constituents are the descendants of the people who populated John Steinbeck’s novels, his most famous—The Grapes of Wrath—set only miles from the Portuguese American meeting hall.

The immigrants, from the Azores and Armenia and Mexico and elsewhere, together with the internal refugees who fled the Dust Bowl, turned this area into the world’s most fertile region. The farmers, small-business owners, and others celebrating Nunes’s victory together tonight inherited the instinctive generosity and native shrewdness of the men and women who settled the district.

Yet their success, often their survival, required a certain hardness. It demanded that they have not only a feel for the land but also the ability to read human nature. Not being able to discern character, to spot at first glance a predator, no matter how well he spoke or what he promised, left those they were supposed to protect vulnerable.

That’s why the establishment, the press, the permanent bureaucracy, the tech oligarchs, the urban aristocrats, the Deep State, and all the rest of the ugly beautiful people, will never forgive Devin Nunes. It belittled them that he didn’t care he wasn’t their sort but was proud to be a farm kid, a townie with dirt under his fingernails. What truly drove them mad was that for all their trappings of power, their genuine ability to bend outcomes to their own will, their claims to expertise, their false prophesies, and above all their threats, he saw through them.